Super Talent 120GB SSD FTM20GK25H Review

Super Talent FTM20GK25H Review

As I’m sure many of you know Solid State Disks (SSDs) are the next wave of storage. It’s faster, runs cooler, is more reliable, and uses less power. So really it is better in nearly every respect, nearly being of course price. Every SSD to date has generally cost $10/GB or more, this drive is groundbreaking in that this drive is $5.58/GB (based on today’s Newegg price $669). Whereas your top of the line platter based hard drives are going to cost you $0.80/GB or less. But for those of us who consider themselves power users, and technology purveyors the price is well worth it.

Reason for Buying
This drive being really the first drive to break the $10/GB barrier I am hugely interested in this. 120GB is more than sufficient space for having as many applications as I want without compromise and store a fair bit of data files. I’ve owned a Samsung 64GB SATA-I SSD and was quite disappointed in the below average read/write performance as well as the limited space. So once this was announced I was simply sold. For some people 120GB might seem a bit lightweight but I own many computers and can therefore store large amounts of data on those.

MLC vs. SLC
When Super Talent announced these new consumer line SSDs they made a fairly big point to differentiate between MLC and SLC memory being used on the drives. Not that many people really understand the differences, other than that SLC is faster.

MLC stands for Multi-Level Cell flash; this is the most common type of flash memory used in SD cards to MP3 Players. The basic of this is that each cell can hold two bits of data rather than one. The drawback of MLC is that the write/erase cycles are significantly reduced to around 10,000 read/write cycles, and that the memory is slower. This is still very quick memory don’t get me wrong, but this is still slower than SLC.

SLC stands for Single Level Cell flash these chips generally cost about twice as much as MLC memory per capacity since the same number of cells exist on both chips, it is just that MLC stores two bits per sector and SLC only stores one. SLC is faster, and SLC can do 100,000 write/erase cycles.

Hardware:
Super Talent MasterDrive MX FTM20GK25H (MLC Flash Memory)
Capacity: 120GB
Format Capacity: 112.63GB
Form Factor: 2.5” (standard notebook size)
Interface: SATA II
Warranty: 1 year

This drive is part of the MasterDrive MX series which uses MLC memory. The MasterDrive DX uses SLC memory.

The build quality of the drive is not quite what you’d expect for paying over $600 for. The entire drive is covered in a thin layer of sheetmetal. It really feels cheap almost like an Altoids can. This is certainly a far cry of the really awesome looking Samsung drives with the milled aluminum enclosure. Of course it’s not that most people display their hard drives in plexiglass so I guess that is okay. The drive itself does not get noticeably warm at all during operation.

Oddly the drive came formatted with NTFS. I'm not sure why you would want an internal drive pre-formatted. Of course this is easy to blow away for anyone who has worked with computers at any length of time.

It is worth noting that curiously Super Talent has decided to make a drive with a 120GB capacity rather than the more common 128GB capacity which would be expected since they are using flash memory chips which comes in multiples of two. Obviously the guts of the drive has more than a single flash chip inside, so it is possible to put in a collection of chips to equal 120GB but they would have to mix the size of the chips to do this and for manufacturing consistency you wouldn’t think they would do that.

Now to minimize the amount of read/write cycles per cell pretty much all SSDs use wear level algorithms to scatter the read/write cells across the entire addressable memory. This is to prevent specific cells from being used too many times where the cell gets unusable. It is worth noting that the specifications note ECC (Error Correcting Code) so once cells do get unusable the drive should recognize this and stop using that cell.

Super Talent rates this drive at lasting 65.75 years with 50GB write/erase a day. So the calculation on that is 10,000 Write/erase cycles * 120GB / 50GB = 24000 / 365 days = 65.7534 Years; so they rounded a bit. So for desktop/mobile applications this should effectively be longer than the life of the machine (Who really uses a 10 year old machine much less a machine older than my parents?). It is somewhat concerning in that Super Talent only offers a 1 year warranty on this drive. So if the drive or memory does not really allow for that many write/erase cycles most likely you won’t find that out in the warranty period.

Benchmarks:
(check screenshots below)
HD Tune Benchmarks
Read Minimum: 83.2MB/sec
Read Maximum: 104.1MB/sec
Read Average: 97.6MB/sec
Read Access Time: 0.5ms
Read Burst: 136.3MB/sec

Write Minimum: 28.3MB/sec
Write Maximum: 40.4MB/sec
Write Average: 36.6MB/sec
Write Access Time: 0.5ms
Write Burst: 137.1MB/sec

These speeds are certainly very respectable. And are surprisingly close to the advertised 40MB write, 120GB read speeds. Both tests show a consistent speed across the drive, as well as a pretty regular spikes/dips. This suggests that there is some caching involved in the read and write process somewhere.

HD Tune Test Machine
Dell Inspiron 530
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
4GB PC2-5300 DDR2 RAM

Windows Vista Ultimate Boot = 34 Seconds
Photoshop CS3 Load = 5 Seconds

Real World Test Machine
Dell XPS M1330
Intel Core 2 Duo T7500
4GB PC2-5300 DDR2

Overall Impressions:
This drive is simply amazing. The machine simply is quick application load times are super quick, and it is hard to find fault with the speed. Write speed is a little on the slow side but due to the quick seek times it certainly does not feel slow. This certainly feels a whole lot faster than my Samsung 64GB SATA I drive. This is very comparable to the speed and quickness of a modern desktop hard drive.

Conclusion:
It is really hard to find a fault with this drive at all. It performs great, very close to the advertised speed. The drive packaging (both box, and enclosure) are pretty cheap and is very unassuming. However, these are really minor in the grand scheme of things. I would definitely recommend this drive for any power user wanting to put up the cash. Do not be put off by the fallacies of MLC memory this drive is very quick!

Pros:
120GB, Largest SSD under a $1k
$5.58/GB, shatters the $10/GB barrier by miles.
Performs very close to advertised throughput speeds.

Cons:
120GB, not enough space to be your only drive.
$5.58/GB, this is still very expensive for your average consumer and most will pass because of this.
Box, and drive could be a little cooler on the design department.
Not recommended for Server environments or systems with very high I/O (but if you do let me know how it works out I want to know the write/erase performance)

 

Give me a price! 669$?

 

Yep Newegg has them right now for $669 but there are only a few left so I imagine they will go pretty quick. Newegg did a little switch-a-roo on us and I bought the drive last week for $649.

 

is ur 34 sec ultimate boottime 64 bit or 32 bit, and have u tweakd comp/ have a bunch of startup programs?

 

34 sec boot with an ssd is terrible lol. I manage 40 seconds with a 1.5ghz core duo and a 5400rpm hd!

 

That's one concern I have about SSDs - the boot times are no better than faster HDDs. I would have thought drive speed was the key to boot times and therefore SSDs would be much faster. That they load Word in 1/2 second rather than 1 second (numbers for illustrative purposes only) doesn't seem all that significant to me.

 

Boot times are crap. Who cares, it`s what the performance AFTER is that counts.
Just look at those read/write speeds. WOW.
But a bit too steep for my liking,I`d pay a maximum of 2$/GB.

 

yeah i'm pretty sure the poor write speed of this ssd causes the slow boot speed.

you'd be wrong in thinking that all ssds have poor boot times, only the ones with poor write speeds.

 

What OS is doing heavy write cycles at boot time? You're pulling a lot of small files in a (physical layout) random fashion whch is what an SSD should excel at.

You might be writing a small amount of hardware state information but that should be about it.

Cheers,

 

@ai42 : do you feel that sometimes the drive slows, e.g. when you open Outlook or any other software needing lots of i/o in a short time ? I had from time to time this problem with my Sandisk, I don't know the cause.

 

Boot times seem a reasonable benchmark if you clone a HDD to an SSD or otherwise are comparing apples to apples. Lots of disk activity for a relatively long time. Are there many other disk intensive actions that last tens of seconds? Comparing boot times with totally different set-ups is not very meaningful.

My typical boot time with a HDD is around 30 seconds. I don't recall seeing SSD boot times that are much faster.

 

For the record,I noticed HDTune does not show the temperature.
I`m curios just how hot this thing works.

 

Ok sorry I don't check these forums often.

Boot time is a bit slow I am running 32 bit Vista Ultimate, and not really highly optimized. As mentioned earlier this is simply a clone of my previous drive. I could probably optimize it a bit but I don't really care that much.

Do not really notice any real lag with high I/O tasks really.

Yes I noticed the drive does not report a temperature. The drive itself does not put off any noticeable amount of heat at all. Even when I had this on a USB adapter doing the clone the drive was room temp.

 

In that case,it`s SSDian nature is kicking in nicely

 

Maybe you should reinstall Vista on the SSD since the latency on the SSD is what affects the boot up times the most. The SSD should be noticeably faster than a HDD on boot up.

 

Newegg lowered the price $30 to $639
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=20-609-304

 

I bought this SSD from newegg but now that I have it installed in my Sony SZ370P/C, the BIOS recognizes it but once it gets past the BIOS, the HDD light stays on continuously and Vista won't recognize the drive. It works just fine when I put it in a USB enclosure but I want it installed as an internal drive to my laptop.

 

In a couple of years the price will be a lot more affordable and they will be a lot faster, I will buy 2 then!

 

That's funny, Vista should recognize it without issues.
PM Les about it , he`s the resident SSD expert .

 

Boot times are usually a pretty good indication of real life performance. It's the write and read speeds of synthetic benchmarks like HD Tune that have very little to do with real life performance.